1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to print control method and apparatus and, more particularly, to print control method and apparatus for performing overlay printing.
2. Related Background Art
In conventional overlay printing on the printer side, when an overlay image (hereinafter, simply referred to as an overlay) is printed on the foreground or background of a target image, for example, there is a method of changing the order of drawing the overlay into an image memory as disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 2726752. Such a method is effective in case of drawing a draw command directly to an image memory as in page printers with low resolution.
According to the conventional method, however, since a process for drawing the overlay and a process for drawing a print document are separated, the processes are complicated.
For example, in case of a high resolution page printer or a color printer, since the image memory does not have a sufficient memory capacity, a banding process is often performed. If the drawing process of the overlay and the drawing process of the print document are separated here, the banding process of the overlay and the banding process of the print document also have to be performed separately. Thus, an amount of processes increases and an overall processing speed decreases.
As shown in the conventional method, in the overlay process on the printer side, as for a document which has previously been made by an application on a host computer, overlay data of a slip or the like has to be registered in the printer. However, when the user wants to print it by a printer without an overlay function, according to the conventional method, added information such as an overlay or the like cannot be added to document data.
Therefore, a method whereby by adding a stamp, a page number, or the like by a printer driver to a print document made by an application, even a printer without the overlay function can obtain the print document added with the stamp or page number is being considered.
However, when the added information is inserted to the print document, since the printer receives it as one print job, it draws and prints the print data in accordance with the given order in the print job. Therefore, the added information has to be added to the print document in consideration of the order.
In the conventional print document, since the presence of the overlay is not known, there is a case where a periphery of a character is painted (hereinafter, the operation to fully paint or paint out is simply referred to as xe2x80x9cpaintxe2x80x9d) white in order to distinguish the character easily. With such a method, there is a case where the periphery of the character is displayed as a blank area in a portion where the added information for the background and the print document overlap.
The invention is made in consideration of the above conventional method and it is an object of the invention to provide print control method and apparatus which can prevent the occurrence of a blank area of a periphery of a character when the character and an overlay overlap or when there is a character in an overlay which is printed on the foreground.
To accomplish the above object, according to the invention, there is provided a print control method comprising the steps of:
in case of spooling an overlay onto the background, spooling a draw command of each print page of the overlay earlier than a draw command of each print page of a print document; and
when there is a character draw command in the draw command of the print document and the setting of the character draw command is set to a mode to paint a periphery of the character white, changing the setting to a mode in which the periphery of the character is not painted white and spooling the character draw command as a draw command of each print page.
Further, according to the invention, in case of spooling the overlay onto the foreground, the draw command of each print page of the print document is spooled prior to the draw command of each print page of the overlay, and when there is the character draw command in the draw command of the overlay and the setting of the character draw command is set to a mode to paint the periphery of the character white, the setting is changed to a mode in which the periphery of the character is not painted white and the character draw command is spooled as a draw command of each page.
Further, according to the invention, in case of spooling the overlay onto the background, the draw command of each print page of the overlay is spooled prior to the draw command of each print page of the print document, when there is the character draw command in the draw command of the print document and the setting of the character draw command is set to a mode to paint the periphery of the character white, the setting is changed to a mode in which the periphery of the character is not painted white and the character draw command is spooled as a draw command of each print page, in case of spooling the overlay onto the foreground, the draw command of each print page of the print document is spooled prior to the draw command of each print page of the overlay, and when there is the character draw command in the draw command of the overlay and the setting of the character draw command is set to a mode to paint the periphery of the character white, the setting is changed to a mode in which the periphery of the character is not painted white and the character draw command is spooled as a draw command of each page.